' ^'r'K^* C 









>Ms:>^ 



'N-.-C-^ 












4 .'^ 



l^^-]^-^. //7 .*^ ' 



n 



yS^-*"^ *^V 




riass£-f:5'7 



liooK 




PRESENTED RV 



Lihcolhi^hh 



Address of President Roosevelt 
on the occasion of the Celebra- 
tion of the Hundredth Anniver- 
sary of the Birth of Abraham 
Lincoln '^ Hodgenville, Ky. 
February 12, 1909 




Washington 

Government Printing Oflfice 

1909 



Address of President Roosevelt 
on the occasion of the Celebra- 
tion of the Hundredth Anniver- 
sary of the Birth of Abraham 
Lincoln ^ Hodgenville, Ky. 
February 12, 1909 




Washington 

Government Printing Office 

1909 



G 






t:_457 

lIlfQOLN(ANll 



We have met here to celebrate the 
hundredth anniversary of the birth of one 
of the two greatest Americans ; of one of 
the two or three greatest men of the nine- 
teenth century; of one of the greatest 
men in the world's history. This rail 
splitter, this boy who passed his ungainly 
youth in the dire poverty of the poorest 
of the frontier folk, whose rise was by 



2 

weary and painful labor, lived to lead 
his people through the burning flames 
of a struggle from which the nation 
emerged, purified as by fire, born anew to 
a loftier life. After long years of iron 
effort, and of failure that came more often 
than victory, he at last rose to the leader- 
ship of the Republic, at the moment when 
that leadership had become the stupendous 
world-task of the time. He grew to know 
greatness, but never ease. Success came 
to him, but never happiness, save that 



3 

which springs from doing well a painful 

and a vital task. Power was his, but not 
pleasure. The furrows deepened on his 
brow, but his eyes were undimmed by 
either hate or fear. His gaunt shoulders 
were bowed, but his steel thews never 
faltered as he bore for a burden the 
destinies of his people. His great 
and tender heart shrank from giving 
pain; and the task allotted him was 
to pour out like water the life-blood 
of the young men, and to feel in his 



4 

every fiber the sorrow of the women. 

Disaster saddened but never dismayed 
him. As the red years of war went by 
they found him ever doing his duty in the 
present, ever facing the future with fear- 
less front, high of heart, and dauntless of 
soul. Unbroken by hatred, unshaken by 
scorn, he worked and suffered for the 
people. Triumph was his at the last; and 
barely had he tasted it before murder 
found him, and the kindly, patient, fear- 
less eyes were closed forever. 



5 

As a people we are indeed beyond 

measure fortunate in the characters of the 
two greatest of our public men, Washing- 
ton and Lincoln. Widely though they 
differed in externals, the Virginia landed 
gentleman and the Kentucky backwoods- 
man, they were alike in essentials, they 
were alike in the great qualities which 
made each able to render service to his 
nation and to all mankind such as no 
other man of his generation could or did 
render. Each had lofty ideals, but each 



in striving to attain these lofty ideals was 
guided by the soundest common sense. 
Each possessed inflexible courage in ad- 
versity, and a soul wholly unspoiled by 
prosperity. Each possessed all the gen- 
tler virtues commonly exhibited by good 
men who lack rugged strength of character. 
Each possessed also all the strong quali- 
ties commonly exhibited by those towering 
masters of mankind who have too often 
shown themselves devoid of so much as 
the understanding of the words by which 



7 

we signify the qualities of duty, of mercy, 

of devotion to the right, of lofty disin- 
terestedness in battling for the good of 
others. There have been other men as 
great and other men as good; but in all 
the history of mankind there are no other 
two great men as good as these, no other 
two good men as great. Widely though 
the problems of to-day differ from the prob- 
lems set for solution to Washington when 
he founded this nation, to Lincoln when 
he saved it and freed the slave,- yet the 



8 

qualities they showed in meeting these 

problems are exactly the same as those 
we should show in doing our work to-day. 
Lincoln saw into the future with the 
prophetic imagination usually vouchsafed 
only to the poet and the seer. He had 
in him all the lift toward greatness of 
the visionary, without any of the vision- 
ary's fanaticism or egotism, without any 
of the visionary's narrow jealousy of the 
practical man and inability to strive in 
practical fashion for the realization of an 



9 

ideal. He had the practical man's hard 

common sense and willingness to adapt 
means to ends; but there was in him 
none of that morbid growth of mind and 
soul which blinds so many practical men 



to the higher things of life. No more 



practical man ever lived than this homely 
backwoods idealist; but he had nothing 
in common with those practical men 
whose consciences are w^arped until they 
fail to distinguish between good and evil, 
fail to understand that strength, ability, 



lO 

shrewdness, whether in the world of busi- 
ness or of poHtics, only serve to make 
their possessor a more noxious, a more 
evil member of the community, if they are 
not guided and controlled by a fine and 
high moral sense. 

We of this day must try to solve many 
social and industrial problems, requiring to 
an especial degree the combination of in- 
domitable resolution with cool-headed san- 
ity. We can profit by the way in which 
Lincoln used both these traits as he strove 



II 

for reform. We can learn much of value 

from the very attacks which following that 
course brought upon his head, attacks alike 
by the extremists of revolution and by 
the extremists of reaction. He never wa- 
vered in devotion to his principles, in his 
love for the Union, and in his abhorrence 
of slavery. Timid and lukewarm people 
were always denouncing him because he 
was too extreme ; but as a matter of fact 
he never went to extremes, he worked step 
by step; and because of this the extrem- 



12 

ists hated and denounced him with a 
fervor which now seems to us fantastic 
in its deification of the unreal and the 
impossible. At the very time when one 
side was holding him up as the apostle of 



social revolution because he was against 



slavery, the leading abolitionist denounced 
him as the "slave hound of Illinois." 
When he was the second time candidate 
for President, the majority of his oppo- 
nents attacked him because of what they 
termed his extreme radicalism, while a 



13 

minority threatened to bolt his nomina- 
tion because he was not radical enough. 
He had continually to check those who 
wished to go forward too fast, at the very 
time that he overrode the opposition of 
those who wished not to go forward at all. 
The goal was never dim before his vision ; 
but he picked his way cautiously, without 
either halt or hurry, as he strode toward 
it, through such a morass of difficulty 
that no man of less courage would have 
attempted it, while it w^ould surely have 



1 4 

overwhelmed any man of judgment less 



serene. 



Yet perhaps the most wonderful thing 
of all, and, from the standpoint of the 
America of to-day and of the future, the 
most vitally important, was the extraordi- 
nary way in which Lincoln could fight 
valiantly against what he deemed wrong 
and yet preserve undiminished his love 
and respect for the brother from whom he 
differed. In the hour of a triumph that 
would have turned any weaker man's 



1^5 

head, in the heat of a struggle which 

spurred many a good man to dreadful 
vindictiveness, he said truthfully that so 
long as he had been in his office he had 
never willingly planted a thorn in any 
man's bosom, and besought his supporters 
to study the incidents of the trial through 
which they were passing as philosophy 
from which to learn wisdom and not as 
wrongs to be avenged; ending with 
the solemn exhortation that, as the 
strife was over, all should reunite in a 



i6 

common effort to save their common 

country. 

He lived in days that were great and 
terrible, when brother fought against 
brother for what each sincerely deemed to 
be the right. In a contest so grim the 
strong men who alone can carry it through 
are rarely able to do justice to the deep 
convictions of those with whom they 
grapple in mortal strife. At such times 
men see through a glass darkly; to only 
the rarest and loftiest spirits is vouchsafed 



17 
that clear vision which gradually comes to 

all, even to the lesser, as the struggle 
fades into distance, and wounds are for- 
gotten, and peace creeps back to the 
hearts that were hurt. But to Lincoln 
was given this supreme vision. He did 
not hate the man from whom he differed. 
Weakness was as foreign as wickedness 
to his strong, gentle nature; but his 
courage was of a quality so high that it 
needed no bolstering of dark passion. 
He saw clearly that the same high quali- 



i8 

ties, the same courage, and willingness 

for self-sacrifice, and devotion to the 
right as it was given them to see the 
right, belonged both to the men of the 
North and to the men of the South. As 
the years roll by, and as all of us, wherever 
we dwell, grow to feel an equal pride in 
the valor and self-devotion, alike of the 
men who wore the blue and the men who 
wore the gray, so this whole nation will 
grow to feel a peculiar sense of pride in 
the man whose blood was shed for the 



19 

union of his people and for the freedom 

of a race; the lover of his country and 
of all mankind; the mightiest of the 
mighty men who mastered the mighty 
days, Abraham Lincoln. 



■9 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




012 025 684 1 



^Mi^^i 






%-*#■ 



..S^^. 5*. 









-^3 



,^^H^^ 



m 



